American newlyweds survive Italian cruise wreck

Thursday

Jan 19, 2012 at 12:01 AMJan 19, 2012 at 7:17 PM

Newlyweds Benji Smith and Emily Lau, of Cambridge, Mass., are speaking out about their ordeal surviving the Italian cruise ship disaster when the captain grounded the liner, leaving it capsized off the coast of Tuscany.

Scott Wachtler

Newlyweds Benji Smith and Emily Lau, of Cambridge, Mass., are speaking out about their ordeal surviving the Italian cruise ship disaster when the captain grounded the liner, leaving it capsized off the coast of Tuscany.

Speaking by phone from a friend’s house in Italy, with only hours of sleep, Lau breathlessly recounted the harrowing story of how she and her husband survived the ordeal on the Costa Cruises, Costa Concordia.

Lau said getting off the sinking ship and dealing with panic-stricken passengers and crew was only half of the story. The lack of leadership and organization on and off the ship was hard to believe and only added to the tragedy.

“I wasn’t worried about drowning to death,” she said. “I was more worried the crew was going to kill us.”

As of Thursday, 11 people were confirmed dead, with 21 missing. A total of 4,200 passengers and crew members were evacuated, according to news reports. Costa Cruises is blaming the ship’s captain of taking the ship off course and too close to the shore.

Lau said, Saturday night, she and her husband were in their cabin looking at pictures when she felt the room tilt. Lau, who has been on a cruise before, said it didn’t feel like a normal jolt.

“Then all the food and wine glasses started falling and the TV fell off the shelf, and I knew that this was not normal,” she said. “That’s when I remembered all the fire drills I’ve been in when I was a kid, and I said lets grab what we need and get upstairs.”

Lau said there were no alarms going off at that point, and the crew was telling people that there was nothing wrong and they should stay in their rooms and remain calm.

“As they were telling us to remain calm, the alarm went off,” she said. “We went upstairs to our muster station, and at that point, people were already crazy. Children were screaming and very stressed.”

Lau said she and her husband remained calm, not realizing the severity of the situation at that point. For a long time, no information was given. People were getting bits and pieces of info in multiple languages.

“We heard it was a minor technical power error, and it was under control and everything was OK and no reason for concern,” she said. “All the messages were coming to us first in Italian, then in Spanish, French and English, so we were all finding out info at different times. There was no one from the cruise ship telling us what to do.”

People became more and more nervous, Lau said. She and Smith had been traveling with her family members from Hong Kong, and she began to worry where they were and if they were OK.

Soon, an announcement came over the loudspeaker –– and even though it was in Italian, Lau and Smith understood the word “disembark.”

“We knew that means abandon ship,” she said. “There was nothing more telling than that. By then, the boat was already quite tilted. Luckily, we were on the high side, and we could start to see people scrambling to get into lifeboats. One of the ladies who was a shopkeeper on the boat blocked people, telling them that we had to line up and let women and children go in first.”

By this time, Lau said she began to see people’s survival instincts kick in. She said she saw people climbing over others to get to the lifeboats.

“It seems to me that people wearing fancy clothes and jewelry were the people who were pushing the old people and children out of their way,” she said.

‘We’re together in this’

As they waited for their turn in the lifeboats, Lau said they knew there was a possibility they might not be able to get on a boat.

“I asked my husband if he was OK with that, and he looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, I’m OK with that. We’re together in this,’” she said.

After waiting for what seemed like 20 minutes for their turn, the crew began filling their lifeboats with women and children first. She was told to get into a lifeboat first, and her husband would come on after the women and children were loaded.

“I am a very calm person in emergencies,” Lau said. “I was thinking clearly, but all the women in the boat around me were wailing and shaking. I put my arm around a German woman and spoke to her in broken German, telling her we were going to be OK.”

At that point, her husband told her that he was being told he wouldn’t be able to get on the boat with her because the boat was full.

“That was when he said, ‘No, I’m getting on with my wife.’ We knew if we weren’t together, we’d be separated forever,” she said. “We were united. We weren’t going to be separated.”

Lau said once people were on the lifeboat, there was clapping and laughing, but little did they know there would be more problems ahead of them.

“No one on the boat knew how to pilot the lifeboat,” she said. “It was just a bunch of random chefs, crew and passengers.”

Some members of the kitchen crew tried to take a leadership role and attempted to lower the lifeboat from the fourth deck to the third deck.

“That’s when we realized that we could get dropped onto the third deck accidentally, and we would all die without even hitting the sea,” she said. “Plus, the boat was jerking left and right. It was like we were in a washing machine.”

By then, the ship had tilted too far and there was no way to lower the lifeboat into the sea. The lifeboat was brought back to the ship. People didn’t know what to do, she said. No one could walk regularly since the liner was so tilted.

“If you were a young child or an older person, you wouldn’t be able to hang on to a railing,” she said. “The boat was sinking. At that point, I thought I would die.”

While they tried to come up with a plan for what to do next, Lau and Smith found their Hong Kong relatives. She said people were jumping from the fourth deck into the cold water, trying to swim ashore.

“I knew I couldn’t do that,” Lau said.

Instead, they found a rope and climbed down 10 feet onto the third deck. By this time, they could see the helicopters and the rescue ship.

“It sounds like all of this happened very fast, but each step of the way took a long time,” she said. “Luckily, the ship stopped sinking, and we calmed down a little. We saw the rescue ships, but they couldn’t get close because it was so windy.”

They climbed over the railing of the third deck and waited on the ship's hull for two hours while the rescue boats got into position so Lau, Smith and the rest of the family could jump aboard.

Lau said her main criticism of their escape from the ship was the lack of command.

“The captain abandoned the ship, including the crew, so the crew had no leadership. We never saw any officers,” she said. “There was no coordination of the rescue.”

The odyssey begins

Once ashore, their odyssey was just beginning. Mass confusion was everywhere. Survivors and crewmembers were on the ground bleeding, and Lau said there was nobody from Costa there to direct them where to go or help.

“You would think that our story was over at this point. We were saved. We were ashore, but this is where our story starts,” she said. “We were treated no better than animals for the next 20 hours.”

A local church offered to let survivors in, but it was already crowded and there was no room. They tried a local motel and waited there for hours for a Costa representative to arrive.

“I would try to ask people what was going on, but the language barrier was difficult,” she said. “Eventually, someone told me that they wanted to take people, by boat, out of there. The last place people wanted to be was on a boat! Nobody even knew where the boat was going.”

Lau and her family decided to wait it out for a bit to see if there would be another option, especially since they were hearing that fights were breaking out for positions on the boats. They ended up spending a sleepless night on the floor of a motel, waiting until morning, without seeing any representatives from Costa. Eventually, they got onto a boat, unaware of their destination.

“In that time we were waiting, no one from Costa or the Italian police offered us anything… a blanket, socks, or a warm drink,” she said.

They were soon transported “like sheep,” Lau said, to a school gymnasium, but still they were given little in the way of information.

"They were taking our names with a pencil and paper! There was no organization. They told us they were taking us to a Marriot Courtyard Hotel by the airport.”

However, when they arrived at the hotel, the staff was unaware that they were going to be host to survivors from the tragedy in Tuscany.

“They said, ‘You mean you’re from that cruise ship?’ and we said, ‘yes,’” she said. “They were kind enough to help us.”

Eventually, 20 hours after the disaster happened, Costa representatives began to arrive and take the names of the survivors.

Lau and Smith also had problems dealing with the Chinese and United States embassies when they called. Neither embassy was able to lend them clothes or money to help them get home.

At the hotel, they connected with friends on Facebook. A mutual friend was able to connect them with Italian friends, and they were able to stay with them. They went home to Cambridge on Thursday.

In spite of the incredibly frightening ordeal, Lau said there is a silver lining to everything.

“After dealing with this, I think Benji and I will be together forever,” she said. “I watched Benji help some old people and children who weren’t able to get to the boats. We saw that people don’t always do that. They run for their lives. Benji is a wonderful man. People think they’re very special and very kind, but I saw, first hand, that people are not kind when they think they’re going to die.”